Through Arctic Lapland

by Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne

As the world increased in the easy lands of the South, so have the Lapps through the centuries been ever squeezed at its verge towards the bleak, unknown North. It is but rarely they have consented to band together and raise objection. The Norwegians made them serfs by proclamation in the ninth century, and serfs they remained, contentedly enough, so long as the ill-usage dealt out to them was not over-brutal. When they could stand it no longer, they took refuge in the savage forest-dingles, and made expeditions for houghing their enemies’ cattle and burning down their wooden homesteads. By this means they regained a wandering independence; but in the fourteenth century the Norskmen again coveted a subject race, and made systematic raids on the nomads, and again wrote them down as serfs in their census. And in the sixteenth century the Swedes followed suit. But only a few of the Lapps were caught. The great majority were still free wanderers on the fjeld and the tundras.

The only Lapps who really suffered were those who were held by the Birkarlians—a band of Swedish adventurers who flourished from the thirteenth century right away down to the year 1700; and in the hands of these hard men they endured what was little better than slavery. They had no redress. They had no trades unions amongst themselves; they did not belong to that larger trades union which is known as a nation; and if the Birkarlians in the course of progress could have endured to this day, it is probable that they would still be holding stunted Laplanders as their unpaid menials.

But time sweeps on, and the sentiment of the world alters. The peculiar institution of slavery has for one reason and another dropped through into mere history; and governments which at one time thought the only self-respecting thing to do was to either shoot the aboriginal or shackle him into servitude, now look upon him as an amiable curiosity, and write out laws for his preservation, much in the same spirit as they appoint close seasons for the elk and the ptarmigan and the aurochs.

Under this fostering care the total Lapp population has risen to some 32,000 as near as it can be reckoned; of which 18,500 wander within the marches of Norway, 7500 are in Sweden, and the balance own as over-lords the Archduke of Finland, and his master the Great White Czar; and each government has its own preservation rules.

The fundamental note of the Russian régime is “No Vodki,” and it is easy to create a Prohibition State where distances are big, transport difficult, and the inducements to smuggle small. Norway very wisely does not worry about the liquor question, as in practice there, by reason of the settlement of the country, it would be quite impossible to restrain the aboriginal from purchasing aquavit if he intended to do it. So the Norskman lets the Fin-ne, as he calls the Lapp, diet himself entirely according to taste; and as a consequence, at an occasional wedding, or an annual meat-selling, the little man spends one afternoon in getting blind drunk. He has all the rest of the year to get the aniseed flavour entirely out of his system, so, physically speaking, not much harm is done. Sweden, too, follows the same policy, but provides a slightly less noxious brand of drink.

The Scandinavian farmer, however, who has the Lapp reindeer-herder for an occasional neighbour, does not agree with the enthusiastic theorists who in Stockholm and Christiania make the laws for his preservation. Socially he regards the Lapp as though he were some noxious kind of ape, the which is quite understandable, because the spirit which fosters Aborigines’ Protection Societies can only exist at a considerable distance from the aboriginal. He sees the Lapp and his doings personally, and (being somewhat unread) does not regard him from the point of view of an interesting relic of the past. He merely looks upon him in the light of the present, and finds him a thorn in the flesh.

In the old viking days the Scandinavian would yield to no one in his appetite for thieving; but with advancing civilisation he has grown to be a staunch anti-pilferer. He has had game-laws set up above his head, and he respects them. He is allowed to shoot one elk on his own estate, and only one elk, per annum, and he must shoot it in a certain fixed month; and it is not pleasant for him to see the Lapp (who knows no law except the rule of appetite) gaily slaying the great deer whenever they come within range of a rifle-bullet. It annoys him, too, to have his cows milked on the mountains, and his rivers and lakes poached with system and industry. Moreover, it is his custom to leave all his worldly goods unlocked and unguarded, and he expects that no one will steal them; so that when the mountain Lapp comes out of the forest like a quiet ghost, and annexes any trifle, from a sheep to a parcel of smoked salmon which may strike his fancy, the farmer rages, and makes no allowance for the neglect of education. It is tolerably useless to apply to the Government for redress, because governments move slowly, and a Lapp moving on the fjeld, if not tackled at once, is hard to catch; and so he takes the law (and a Remington rifle) into his own most capable hands.

Then begins the trouble. The mountain Lapp, according to his instincts, has stolen; and although under pressure he might peaceably give up the transferred goods, he has a strong dislike to indiscriminate retaliation—when applied to himself. So when he comes across the rotting carcasses of first one, then another, then a dozen, then a score of his cherished deer, ruthlessly shot down and left in their wallows, he accepts the vendetta, and prepares to carry it into bloody effect. He owns a rifle, this nomad herder of to-day, who rears the rensdyr amongst the rugged mountains of the Scandinavian peninsula; and though it is an early breech-loader, cast from the army in the early seventies, it is a deadly enough weapon when the butt is cuddled by a vengeful shoulder. And he goes down to the valley-farms and puts lead into beast or man, whichever comes in his way. Upon which the farmers, still saying no word to the Government, arm and organise a Lapp-hunt; and the mountains swallow the tale of what is done; and those who come back to the farms sit down assured that at least some of the aborigines will pester them no more.

This then is the state of things which obtains in this year of grace amongst the fjelds and forests of Northern Norway and Sweden, and as a consequence the Lapps are slow of increase. Over the border, however, in Lapland proper, and in Russian Lapland, their numbers rise appreciably every decade, though it is perhaps hard to decide which are genuine Lapps and which belong to a mixed race. In the extreme east of their territory they are apt to intermarry with the Samoyedes; and I think it is a significant fact that the outer garments of the two races—the Lapp matsoreo, and the Samoyede militza—are both fashioned on the same cut. In Russian Lapland there is an obvious intermixture with the Russian moujik, and in Lapland proper they naturally marry largely with the all-pervading Finn.

The inhabitant of Lapland is not so light-fingered as his more western brother, perhaps because there is less opportunity of pilfering. And he does not make himself so unpopular, because there are fewer aliens for him to get unpopular with, and no one goes out regularly to shoot him as a domestic nuisance. In fact the Lapps we were in contact with (and the Finns, too, for that matter) never stole any of our particular properties; though at the same time it should be confessed that we had remarkably little worth stealing, as the whole of our outfit after Enare (including the clothes on our backs) was not worth a couple of sovereigns, and we did keep a remarkably sharp eye on even the few trifles we had.